Mind Boggling !!

Robot relieves Rubiks rage

I really like to play around with Rubik's cube... amazing that people have designed robos that can complete the puzzle . Great !!

Ten Rules for Web Startups

I like this article, worth reading by every aspiring entrepreneur

Source: "http://evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp"

#1: Be Narrow
Focus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would potentially be useful. Most companies start out trying to do too many things, which makes life difficult and turns you into a me-too. Focusing on a small niche has so many advantages: With much less work, you can be the best at what you do. Small things, like a microscopic world, almost always turn out to be bigger than you think when you zoom in. You can much more easily position and market yourself when more focused. And when it comes to partnering, or being acquired, there's less chance for conflict. This is all so logical and, yet, there's a resistance to focusing. I think it comes from a fear of being trivial. Just remember: If you get to be #1 in your category, but your category is too small, then you can broaden your scope—and you can do so with leverage.

#2: Be Different
Ideas are in the air. There are lots of people thinking about—and probably working on—the same thing you are. And one of them is Google. Deal with it. How? First of all, realize that no sufficiently interesting space will be limited to one player. In a sense, competition actually is good—especially to legitimize new markets. Second, see #1—the specialist will almost always kick the generalist's ass. Third, consider doing something that's not so cutting edge. Many highly successful companies—the aforementioned big G being one—have thrived by taking on areas that everyone thought were done and redoing them right. Also? Get a good, non-generic name. Easier said than done, granted. But the most common mistake in naming is trying to be too descriptive, which leads to lots of hard-to-distinguish names. How many blogging companies have "blog" in their name, RSS companies "feed," or podcasting companies "pod" or "cast"? Rarely are they the ones that stand out.

#3: Be Casual
We're moving into what I call the era of the "Casual Web" (and casual content creation). This is much bigger than the hobbyist web or the professional web. Why? Because people have lives. And now, people with lives also have broadband. If you want to hit the really big home runs, create services that fit in with—and, indeed, help—people's everyday lives without requiring lots of commitment or identity change. Flickr enables personal publishing among millions of folks who would never consider themselves personal publishers—they're just sharing pictures with friends and family, a casual activity. Casual games are huge. Skype enables casual conversations.

#4: Be Picky
Another perennial business rule, and it applies to everything you do: features, employees, investors, partners, press opportunities. Startups are often too eager to accept people or ideas into their world. You can almost always afford to wait if something doesn't feel just right, and false negatives are usually better than false positives. One of Google's biggest strengths—and sources of frustration for outsiders—was their willingness to say no to opportunities, easy money, potential employees, and deals.

#5: Be User-Centric
User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's still undervalued and under-invested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board. Better to iterate a hundred times to get the right feature right than to add a hundred more. The point of Ajax is that it can make a site more responsive, not that it's sexy. Tags can make things easier to find and classify, but maybe not in your application. The point of an API is so developers can add value for users, not to impress the geeks. Don't get sidetracked by technologies or the blog-worthiness of your next feature. Always focus on the user and all will be well.

#6: Be Self-Centered
Great products almost always come from someone scratching their own itch. Create something you want to exist in the world. Be a user of your own product. Hire people who are users of your product. Make it better based on your own desires. (But don't trick yourself into thinking you are your user, when it comes to usability.) Another aspect of this is to not get seduced into doing deals with big companies at the expense or your users or at the expense of making your product better. When you're small and they're big, it's hard to say no, but see #4.

#7: Be Greedy
It's always good to have options. One of the best ways to do that is to have income. While it's true that traffic is now again actually worth something, the give-everything-away-and-make-it-up-on-volume strategy stamps an expiration date on your company's ass. In other words, design something to charge for into your product and start taking money within 6 months (and do it with PayPal). Done right, charging money can actually accelerate growth, not impede it, because then you have something to fuel marketing costs with. More importantly, having money coming in the door puts you in a much more powerful position when it comes to your next round of funding or acquisition talks. In fact, consider whether you need to have a free version at all. The TypePad approach—taking the high-end position in the market—makes for a great business model in the right market. Less support. Less scalability concerns. Less abuse. And much higher margins.

#8: Be Tiny
It's standard web startup wisdom by now that with the substantially lower costs to starting something on the web, the difficulty of IPOs, and the willingness of the big guys to shell out for small teams doing innovative stuff, the most likely end game if you're successful is acquisition. Acquisitions are much easier if they're small. And small acquisitions are possible if valuations are kept low from the get go. And keeping valuations low is possible because it doesn't cost much to start something anymore (especially if you keep the scope narrow). Besides the obvious techniques, one way to do this is to use turnkey services to lower your overhead—Administaff, ServerBeach, web apps, maybe even Elance.

#9: Be Agile
You know that old saw about a plane flying from California to Hawaii being off course 99% of the time—but constantly correcting? The same is true of successful startups—except they may start out heading toward Alaska. Many dot-com bubble companies that died could have eventually been successful had they been able to adjust and change their plans instead of running as fast as they could until they burned out, based on their initial assumptions. Pyra was started to build a project-management app, not Blogger. Flickr's company was building a game. Ebay was going to sell auction software. Initial assumptions are almost always wrong. That's why the waterfall approach to building software is obsolete in favor agile techniques. The same philosophy should be applied to building a company.

#10: Be Balanced
What is a startup without bleary-eyed, junk-food-fueled, balls-to-the-wall days and sleepless, caffeine-fueled, relationship-stressing nights? Answer?: A lot more enjoyable place to work. Yes, high levels of commitment are crucial. And yes, crunch times come and sometimes require an inordinate, painful, apologies-to-the-SO amount of work. But it can't be all the time. Nature requires balance for health—as do the bodies and minds who work for you and, without which, your company will be worthless. There is no better way to maintain balance and lower your stress that I've found than David Allen's GTD process. Learn it. Live it. Make it a part of your company, and you'll have a secret weapon.

#11 (bonus!): Be Wary
Overgeneralized lists of business "rules" are not to be taken too literally. There are exceptions to everything.

Installing Ubuntu Or Fedora From A Windows Or Linux System With UNetbootin

I really liked this , Start installing linux without CD / DVD from windows . UNetbootin allows windows users to quickly start installing Linux on there machine without have a CD / DVD .. looking forward to try this out when ever i get a chance

"Introduction : UNetbootin allows for the installation of Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuse, Arch Linux, or Debian to a real partition, so it's no different from a standard install, only it has the advantage that it needs no CD. This is meant for people who want to install Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuse, Arch Linux, or Debian but don't have a CD-R to burn, lack a CD writer, or they want to install on a computer that doesn't have a CD-ROM drive, like an ultra-portable laptop.

UNetbootin uses a Windows or Linux-based installer to install a small modification to the bootloader (grldr and boot.ini for NT-based systems, grub.exe and config.sys for Win9x, or grub on Linux), uses the bootloader to boot the netboot initrd and kernel, then uses that to download and install Ubuntu directly from the internet, no CD required. After Linux is installed, the modification to the bootloader is then undone."

http://lubi.sourceforge.net/unetbootin.html

On Page Search Engine Optimization

Source: http://www.websitepublisher.net/article/on-page-seo/

On-page SEO is anything that you do to your site files themselves in order to rank better in the search engines. This differs from off-page SEO, which is primarily concerned with gaining links to your site from other sites.

You need both on-page and off-page SEO to rank well, the best on-page SEO isn't going to get you anywhere without good incoming links. And the best incoming links in the world can't help you if your site is crawler poison.

On-Page Optimization Checklist

1. Descriptive literal title tag that includes your keywords.
2. Descriptive literal meta description tag that includes your keywords and entices clicks from readers
3. Meta keywords tag that includes your main keywords, minor keywords, misspellings, and words you may wish to target but that are not commonly found in your content. Don't stress out too much when making it.
4. Clean, coherent, HTML or CSS markup with as little markup coding as possible, externally included files for CSS definitions. Fast loading, accessible, and compatible.
5. Source code formatted so your most important menu items are read first.
6. Descriptive literal ALT & TITLE attributes for images & anchor tags (links) that include your keywords.
7. No use of frames for public content you want search engines to see.
8. Conservative use of javascript, do not use it to display important content.
9. Conservative use of Flash as an option for viewing your site, never a requirement.
10. Normal HTML based navigation alternatives if form based navigation must be used.
11. Descriptive literal heading tags (h1, etc) that include your keywords with good density and are used properly to sectionalize content.
12. Effectively keyword rich content that is descriptive, literal, and goes into great detail.
13. A fully optimized and accessible menu.

Linux is like icecream

Quoting from :
SUPERGUIDE: The Open Source Challenge. How to replace Windows completely with Ubuntu.

Linux is like ice cream

But not a box of chocolates. Well, unless you bring virtualisation into it. Anyway, if operating systems were ice cream Windows would be vanilla, and it'd come in different serves such as cones, cups, and bath tubs full of the stuff. Linux as you know isn't quite like that -- you sort of have to bring your own containers. Some people even build their own. But it does come in a hundred flavours to suit almost every taste.

The flavour for our foray will be Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support), a Debian-based distribution and the very version bundled with APC in the August 2006 issue, but you can also download it here. For the purposes of imagery, lets call this flavour chocolate, because chocolate is nice. If you don't like chocolate, it can be strawberry, I don't mind.

Chocolate is a popular, amiable flavour and Ubuntu is no different. It's built a reputation as the easiest and most desktop-focused distribution available, and so is a good choice for this adventure.

Keeping in mind that as Vista is a DVD release, we'll be installing the DVD version as well, weighing in at just over 3GB. As 64-bit processors are the de-facto now, and Vista can be installed in a 64-bit native version (which has substantially more drivers available for it than XP 64-bit ever had), we'll also be going with the 64-bit edition of Ubuntu, running on an Athlon 64 4400+ with 2GB of memory.

As far as installation goes, it's as simple as specifying a username, timezone, and target partition, and doesn't bear a rating. Especially as there's no direct comparison with Windows, which for many comes pre-installed.

Ubuntu on dell latitude D630

this is a sequel to my earlier My linux laptop :)

after looking at my cool laptop fully loaded with Ubuntu, my friend wanted to install Ubuntu on his laptop which is a dell latitude D630 .

we had some issues initially as it was not recognizing the display drivers correctly.we have called dell technical support and they said they dont support linux on this model .

after searching through the net we found couple of interesting links. which talk about how to get the display to work with Ubuntu on dell latitude D630.

we had download alternate desktop CD from ubuntu download.
and installed Ubuntu 7.04 using the text based installer . then updated / upgraded the distro using the following commands.

:~$ # sudo aptitude update
:~$ # sudo aptitude dist-upgrade

then removed the package xserver-xorg-video-i810 from aptitude . it automatically installed the xserver-xorg-video-intel-2:1.9.94. and then just restarted the machine .
thats it Ubuntu was able to recognize the display driver , cool ..........

my friend is now enjoying the ubuntu flavor :)

My linux laptop

its been a great pleasure installing linux( ubuntu 7.04) on my dell inspiron 640m . i have installed ubuntu on desktops before but that didn't give me as much pleasure as this one did .. that may be because of the presumption that linux is not that good on laptops ..... well that statement need to be fixed now..

i have started installing the Ubuntu 7.04 and with in 30 mins every thing was up and running ..

i have the following things running perfectly

Graphical settings
Skype / yahoo (kopete)
Email client (thunderbird )
Bluefish IDE for web development
GTpod for my ipod
k3b for burning my cd's / dvd's


Conclusion : you can install ubuntu on you Dell Inspiron 640 m and have lots and lots of fun :)

Install Mysql plugin for ruby on rails

Installing Mysql Plugin for ruby on rails .
requirements
*) Install Mysql ,Mysql-development module, mysql client through apt-get , yum or up2date

Next intall mysql plugin using gem command

desktop:~# gem install mysql -- --with-mysql include=/usr/include/mysql --with-mysql-lib=/usr/lib/mysql --with-mysql-config --no-rdoc --no-ri
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Select which gem to install for your platform (i486-linux)
1. mysql 2.7.3 (mswin32)
2. mysql 2.7.1 (mswin32)
3. mysql 2.7 (ruby)
4. mysql 2.6 (ruby)
5. mysql 2.5.1 (ruby)
6. Cancel installation
> (Enter option as require )


Thats it.... Now you can able to connect the mysql through ruby.

Need not pay your mobile bills from your pocket

I see an increasing boom in web services which say that you need not pay your mobile bills anymore, just give them your mobile number and your interests thats it, you start receiving advertisements customized for you.....and you start earning money...amazing right???

I gave it a try by registering myself at one of such services over one month back and there are no positive (did not earn any money yet) or negative ( my mobile number has not been misused yet) effects as of now. Have to check the privacy issues before registering as we have to give our mobile number and our mailing address to receive our cheques.

I am not propagating any of those web services here but would like to make a point to marketing managers who are in desperate search of unique ad-campaign ideas.

One thing I understood from the increase in number of such services is that they all want to make money from the untamed market (mobile user community). Marketing Managers just note this point, think ways to target the mobile user community to position yourselves in the market and I definitely feel that this would be a great hit in future. We watch all kinds of ads on Television, from hair-band to aeroplanes but are never paid a single penny and here comes a unique media campaign in which the audience are paid.

Let us watch the trends in the coming future.

my dynamic dns client

I run linux on my home PC and wanted to access my home machine when ever and where ever , but i don't have a static ip as i have a bsnl data one connection ... so i was looking for options .

initially i wrote a small script that sends me an email periodically every 4 hours or so .And i used to check my mails to know my machine IP . Then thought of using dyndns.

I started exploring that . i have registered an account and installed the recommended ddclient in ubuntu and it was throwing some error like "caught SIGTERM; exiting " .

so started writing a small script for myself . all this script does is runs periodically to check if the ip of my machine has changed and update dyndns.org if there is a change . i have been running this for a month now and had no issues .

it was fun developing it and its simple to use . no complications . hope it will be useful to others .

You can download it from here.

A List Apart: Articles: Using XHTML/CSS for an Effective SEO Campaign

A List Apart: Articles: Using XHTML/CSS for an Effective SEO Campaign: "Using XHTML/CSS for an Effective SEO Campaign"

resetting the mysql root password

to reset the mysql root password.

login as the root and follow the steps

service mysql stop

wait until MySQL shuts down. Then run

mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables &

then you will be able to login as root with no password.

mysql -uroot mysql

In MySQL command line prompt issue the following command:

UPDATE user SET password=PASSWORD("abcd") WHERE user="root";
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

At this time your root password is reset to "abcd" and MySQL will now
know the privileges and you'll be able to login with your new password:

mysql -uroot -pabcd mysql


Enjoy .............

http://a2ztesting.freeforums.org

Hello Everyone....this week I started a forum called a2ztesting hosted by freeforums.org...there are many forums for software testing but I preferred starting a new forum so that I can take lion share responsibility of making the forum to reach every enthusiastic software test engineer. And the rest of the responsibility lies in making this forum a very useful one, by all of you by contributing most valuable things like your knowledge, experience etc.,

here is the site where you all can register http://a2ztesting.freeforums.org

awaiting to see you all there (as members :))

Quick Hack : P2P block on IPCop 1.4.15

I was trying to install P2P block v 2.5 on ipcop version 1.4.15 and it was not allowing me to do so
as p2p block was written to work for the following versions 1.4.8 to 1.4.11 .... and i found a quick hack for this and wanted to share with every one ..

Step 1 : login to ipcop using ssh and #vi /var/ipcop/general-functions.pl

Step 2 : change this line $General::version = '1.4.15'; to $General::version = '1.4.11';

Step 3 : tar xvzf p2pblock_ipcop_1.4.11.tar.gz

Step 4 : cd p2pblock

Step 5 : ./install

Step 6 : after the installation is successful please revert the General version back to 1.4.15
#vi /var/ipcop/general-functions.pl
#$General::version = '1.4.15';

and you are all set .. hope this is helpful :)

--CS

Viral Marketing Techniques the Typical Business Website Can Deploy Now

by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant
Web Marketing Today, Issue 71, February 8, 2000
German

---

If you're creative, you may be able to come up with a brilliant viral marketing business plan based on my "Six Simple Principlies of Viral Marketing." http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles.htm In the meantime, here are some viral marketing techniques you can deploy immediately that will do some good:

Encourage Links to Your Site

You can do a number of things to encourage links to your site. Register with search engines, of course, and seek reciprocal links. Here are some approaches designed to set up an exponential response to your efforts.

Write articles and encourage other to post them free as content for their site. If you're an expert in a particular area, write an article about an aspect of it. Then offer it to complementary sites to post on their site as free content, so long as the article contains links to your site. Your article could go far and wide, especially if it is carried on the wings of e-mail to others who will distribute the same article to their network of contacts.

Set up an affiliate program to encourage links to your products. Affiliate programs are a form of network marketing that provides financial incentive for other sites to link to yours. Make sure you pay enough to make this attractive to already-saturated siteowners.

Send out news releases concerning a free service or product available on your site. The key here is to have a truly newsworthy event, contest, free service, or digital download. If your news release is carried by just 5% of the media you send it to, you could have your URL in front of tens of thousands of readers quite inexpensively.

Encourage Word-of-Mouth Recommendations

Word-of-mouth (on the Web it's "word-of-mouse") is considered the very best advertising, because it is unsolicited. Here are some ways to encourage friends to share with friends, and use their network to promote your site.

Install a Recommend-It.com referral system. Recommend-It won't save a dismal site, but it will help your visitors promote your site to their network of friends. Read our review at http://www.wilsonweb.com/reviews/recommend-it.htm

Make it easy to e-mail or fax your webpage to a friend. Encourage readers to e-mail your webpage to a friend. (If you know of some good CGI or JavaScript programs to do this, please e-mail me at mailto:rfwilson@wilsonweb.com) This is similar to recommend your site, but allows your visitor to send specific content as well. This is easier to accomplish without a database-driven site.

Encourage people to forward your newsletter to friends. Always encourage readers to forward your e-mail newsletter to their friends. Do this at the end of a newsletter, and you may jog some readers to do it immediately. It's easy to do.

Offer Desirable Products or Services that Spread Your Message

Finally, you can provide free services or products on your site that help spread your message to an increasing number of people who hear about it. Several companies offer free e-mail addresses using your domain name. But it's too late to repeat Hotmail's phenomenal success, and the free services will likely tack their own ads onto the free e-mail messages. Here are some more likely possibilities. See sources on our Viral Marketing Resources page http://www.wilsonweb.com/webmarket/viral.htm

Enable visitors to e-mail post cards or greeting cards from your website. Such scripts are not very expensive. Though you can't compete with the Web's top card sites, if you have a unique spin on your product or service, you may carve out some real interest and traffic.

Offer a digital game or utility for free download that carries your marketing message. Games carrying your ad or screen savers are just a couple of the possibilities. Others are games or graphic demos that people can e-mail to their friends.

Most important of all, think of unique ways your can build viral marketing techniques into your future marketing programs. Programs that carry a strong viral marketing component get you much more traffic for your investment than straight advertising.

The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing

by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant
Web Marketing Today, February 1, 2005. Originally published 2/1/2000

---

I admit it. The term "viral marketing" is offensive. Call yourself a Viral Marketer and people will take two steps back. I would. "Do they have a vaccine for that yet?" you wonder. A sinister thing, the simple virus is fraught with doom, not quite dead yet not fully alive, it exists in that nether genre somewhere between disaster movies and horror flicks.

But you have to admire the virus. He has a way of living in secrecy until he is so numerous that he wins by sheer weight of numbers. He piggybacks on other hosts and uses their resources to increase his tribe. And in the right environment, he grows exponentially. A virus don't even have to mate -- he just replicates, again and again with geometrically increasing power, doubling with each iteration:

1
11
1111
11111111
1111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

In a few short generations, a virus population can explode.

Viral Marketing Defined

What does a virus have to do with marketing? Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as "word-of-mouth," "creating a buzz," "leveraging the media," "network marketing." But on the Internet, for better or worse, it's called "viral marketing." While others smarter than I have attempted to rename it, to somehow domesticate and tame it, I won't try. The term "viral marketing" has stuck.

The Classic Hotmail.com Example

The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The strategy is simple:

1. Give away free e-mail addresses and services,
2. Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com" and,
3. Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and associates,
4. Who see the message,
5. Sign up for their own free e-mail service, and then
6. Propel the message still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.

Like tiny waves spreading ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.

Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy

Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple Hotmail.com strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:

1. Gives away products or services
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
3. Scales easily from small to very large
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors
5. Utilizes existing communication networks
6. Takes advantage of others' resources

Let's examine at each of these elements briefly.

1. Gives away valuable products or services

"Free" is the most powerful word in a marketer's vocabulary. Most viral marketing programs give away valuable products or services to attract attention. Free e-mail services, free information, free "cool" buttons, free software programs that perform powerful functions but not as much as you get in the "pro" version. Wilson's Second Law of Web Marketing is "The Law of Giving and Selling" (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmta/basic-principles.htm). "Cheap" or "inexpensive" may generate a wave of interest, but "free" will usually do it much faster. Viral marketers practice delayed gratification. They may not profit today, or tomorrow, but if they can generate a groundswell of interest from something free, they know they will profit "soon and for the rest of their lives" (with apologies to "Casablanca"). Patience, my friends. Free attracts eyeballs. Eyeballs then see other desirable things that you are selling, and, presto! you earn money. Eyeballs bring valuable e-mail addresses, advertising revenue, and e-commerce sales opportunities. Give away something, sell something.

2. Provides for effortless transfer to others

Public health nurses offer sage advice at flu season: stay away from people who cough, wash your hands often, and don't touch your eyes, nose, or mouth. Viruses only spread when they're easy to transmit. The medium that carries your marketing message must be easy to transfer and replicate: e-mail, website, graphic, software download. Viral marketing works famously on the Internet because instant communication has become so easy and inexpensive. Digital format make copying simple. From a marketing standpoint, you must simplify your marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without degradation. Short is better. The classic is: "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com." The message is compelling, compressed, and copied at the bottom of every free e-mail message.

3. Scales easily from small to very large

To spread like wildfire the transmission method must be rapidly scalable from small to very large. The weakness of the Hotmail model is that a free e-mail service requires its own mailservers to transmit the message. If the strategy is wildly successful, mailservers must be added very quickly or the rapid growth will bog down and die. If the virus multiplies only to kill the host before spreading, nothing is accomplished. So long as you have planned ahead of time how you can add mailservers rapidly you're okay. You must build in scalability to your viral model.

4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors

Clever viral marketing plans take advantage of common human motivations. What proliferated "Netscape Now" buttons in the early days of the Web? The desire to be cool. Greed drives people. So does the hunger to be popular, loved, and understood. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail messages. Design a marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission, and you have a winner.

5. Utilizes existing communication networks

Most people are social. Nerdy, basement-dwelling computer science grad students are the exception. Social scientists tell us that each person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close network of friends, family, and associates. A person's broader network may consist of scores, hundreds, or thousands of people, depending upon her position in society. A waitress, for example, may communicate regularly with hundreds of customers in a given week. Network marketers have long understood the power of these human networks, both the strong, close networks as well as the weaker networked relationships. People on the Internet develop networks of relationships, too. They collect e-mail addresses and favorite website URLs. Affiliate programs exploit such networks, as do permission e-mail lists. Learn to place your message into existing communications between people, and you rapidly multiply its dispersion.

6. Takes advantage of others' resources

The most creative viral marketing plans use others' resources to get the word out. Affiliate programs, for example, place text or graphic links on others' websites. Authors who give away free articles, seek to position their articles on others' webpages. A news release can be picked up by hundreds of periodicals and form the basis of articles seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. Now someone else's newsprint or webpage is relaying your marketing message. Someone else's resources are depleted rather than your own.